


tender places

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Category: Anastasia (1997)
Genre: Christian Character, Communism, Community: 31_days, Gen, Orphans, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-10
Updated: 2011-06-10
Packaged: 2017-10-20 07:19:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re trying to teach them interdependence, but Anya wonders if the Communist Party, despite its infinite wisdom, is going about things the wrong way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tender places

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 31-Days prompt for June 4, 2011: The fantastic fortune of fantastic blood.  
> Title from Neko Case’s “Hold On, Hold On.”

Sofi and Alexi were the smallest orphans in the house, and it was Anya’s job to take care of them. The children were snot-nosed and red-cheeked, inarticulate with hunger and loneliness; Anya usually woke to Sofi burrowing into her side, Alexi sprawled over her back, and a dank pile of bedding crumpled at her feet, an offering. Their bedwetting made her furious and terrible, because washing sheets was a task so huge and exhausting that Anya was hungry for days after completing it.

The children clung to the ragged tail of her tunic and gazed at her with wide, adoring eyes. They dogged her every waking step; it felt familiar. She made up stories about Paris, a city of lights, where Koschei the Undying sat on street corners and drank glass after glass of vodka and champagne.

At night, as she laid her body down in the narrow cocoon of her bed, she would lean over and grasp their hands: quietly, so Comrade Phlegmenkoff and the other brats did not hear or suspect, Anya would guide their dirty, grasping fingers in the sign of the cross. She said the prayers for them, under her breath, face pressed into her lumpy pillow; Sofi didn’t talk much, but Alexi was stupid with his words, and Anya didn’t trust him not to blab. _I will not speak of thy mysteries to thine enemies_ , she half-recalled.

 _God is dead_ , Party members from the city always said; Anya wasn’t sure she believed enough in Communism to discard the shaky memories she had of incense and chimes and heavy chanting. She remembered not understanding something very large and safe; the work Comrade Phlegmenkoff gave her to do seemed petty and small-minded in comparison, although it did keep her hands busy and her skull empty.

Perhaps that demanding emptiness was the point, Anya thought; and the children took advantage of her muddled brains and went after the meager food on her plate. She absently hit Alexi upside the head when he snuck a bit of her rations.

She regretted the slap almost immediately; Alexi coughed on his stolen bite of black bread, and then coughed again, and began coughing blood, and was dead of some disease Anya didn’t know the name of by the end of the month. She and two of the stronger boys hacked a hole in the frozen ground that they could pretend was deep enough for the body.

Kolya, the biggest, stopped Evgeny from kicking Alexi’s still shape into the little hole. Anya felt a fierce rush of some painful emotion, as Kolya bent and lifted Alexi up, and gently set the body down. The three of them stood over the grave, awkwardly, no one knowing what to say. Eventually Anya kicked the frozen dirt and walked back to the orphanage; later, she would corner and kiss Kolya against the doorway to the kitchen, and it wouldn’t matter that she had been speechless.

Comrade Phlegmenkoff caught them at it, Kolya’s hand on Anya’s breast, Anya biting hungrily at Kolya’s lower lip. The Comrade cleared her throat and just looked at them, seeming older and uglier than Anya had thought her capable; it was possible she was disappointed.

In the end, Kolya was sent to a job in the mines; he was gone by the end of the month. Anya did laundry for what felt like the entire time, standing shoulder to shoulder with Comrade Phlegmenkoff over the vat of sheets. She breathed through her mouth to avoid the stench of lye soap and stale sweat, and didn’t stop babbling about Paris for a second.

After a second month, the Comrade assigned Sofi to another girl in the orphanage. Anya still didn’t shut up, but at night she rubbed her chapped hands over her mouth and felt a little like weeping, or gnashing her teeth. She practiced laughing instead, shoving her face deeper and deeper into her pillow until the heat of her breath made her roll onto her back. It looked like an absent gesture, when she pinched her thumb and first two fingers together and dragged them from her forehead to her sternum, across her right and left shoulders; it was not.

Anya slept.  __


End file.
